By Layla Tiell, Staff Writer

Somewhere between middle school and our college years, we all decided that being “cringe” was the worst possible thing one could do with their life. 

We buried all the old obsessions, deleted every embarrassing photo and pretended we never tried to start a YouTube channel or make our entire personality about one book, TV show or movie.  

Lately, however, healing has looked suspiciously like… doing all of that again. If you really think about it, healing is not becoming this polished, put-together version of yourself, but letting yourself be just as weird as you were in middle school. This time, we don’t apologize for it, though. When did we all decide that caring too much was embarrassing? 

In middle school, we were not afraid to love things loudly, and since love is such a beautiful thing, it feels strange we ever decided it was something to be ashamed of. So the first suggestion is to let yourself enjoy things publicly. Yes, even that boy band you started liking when you were thirteen.  

We wore merch and talked about our interests too much, but somewhere along the line, we downplayed all of our excitement, pretending we were only casually into our interests. Healing looks like undoing that. Liking things openly does not make you immature, it makes you honest.  

This leads me to my next suggestion: we need to stop editing our personalities for everyone else. Obviously, none of us knew how to be “cool” in middle school, yet somehow that was refreshing. We talked too much, laughed too loud and did not water down parts of ourselves to make others more comfortable.  

Healing is realizing you do not need a different version of yourself for every situation. The right people do not require you to be smaller.  

My imagination used to be my superpower, but as I got older I started running into little pieces of kryptonite. Awkward moments and the fear of being judged were just chipping away at any ounce of carefree attitude I had left.  

In trying to avoid judgment, I think we all stopped ourselves from noticing the small moments that once meant everything. Middle school was full of little things that felt huge at the time, and healing would be letting ourselves feel that way again. 

Not every moment needs to be productive or worthy of your next social media post. Sometimes it is enough to notice the way the air feels, the song playing through your headphones and the people walking by you at the moment.  

Speaking of social media, when did we all become so obsessed with how good our next post looks? Why can’t our next posts be the silly iMovie videos we made with friends? I know it still exists somewhere. There is a possibility it’s still up on your old YouTube channel right now, and you are wondering why in the world you ever thought it was okay to post that.  

You thought it was okay because back then, not everything needed to be impressive or aesthetic. Healing is giving yourself permission to create something that isn’t perfect or purposeful. Create something bad, write something bad, draw something bad, because creativity does not exist to be judged, so neither should we.  

Healing was never about growing out of who we were. Maybe it was always about growing back into it, only this time with better boundaries and more confidence to be free.